I’m home. It’s cold. It’s wet. Okay, it’s really wet. Today is the fifth straight day of rain here. The weather hasn’t the common curtest to deliver some of the precipitation as snow, which all children and a good portion of adults here would love. So we’re soggy and sodden here in a not-quite-cold-enough-for-snow weather pattern that is threatening to go on for even more days.
My daughter was happy to see me, my son was fair-to-middlin’ on welcoming me, saying, “don’t touch me, you’ll get sick” but relented when I told him I was hugging and kissing him weather he liked it or not. The dog was ecstatic. Ecstatic for the longest time, bowling me over again and again in exuberant pounces of happiness because I’d returned home.
The dog has to have a bath once a week because everything likes to affix to her soft-coated Wheaten Terrier fur. It’s luxuriant fur, but it comes with a high-maintenance price. My husband had been keeping her inside, only taking her out to use the bushes when needed, because leaving her out in the rain would only make her dirtier faster.
But I was home and I didn’t mind giving her a bath so I took her outside and after two minutes of her putzing around in the rain, sniffing this and that, I asked her if she wanted to come inside? Of course she didn’t, so I hooked her up to the path light, set a six minute timer on my watch and went inside. I checked on her again and again over the next hour, changing her to the runner stake after a half-hour, and the answer was always the same: I’m not ready to come inside yet.
How do I know this? Because every time I walked out the door I would ask her if she wanted to come in and she’d run the opposite direction as fast as she could. And this did not bother me in the slightest. The sticks and mulch and leaves that were affixed to her legs in her wet and bedraggled state was just fine by me, because I was walking her straight into the bathroom to and plunking her down in the bath tub when she did, eventually, want to come inside.
It took about an hour of cold, wet rain on her to dampen her enthusiasm for the outdoors, and even then, it was only at my insistence that she did come in. When I put her in the already running tub she drank from the faucet while dirt streamed down her legs and into the bath. I turned on the hand attachment and washed her down with fluffy, pink dog shampoo of good smellingness while she stood patiently, getting warmed with the water.
She rather likes baths at this point, particularly when she’s come in from a cold rain. I dried her off with two towels and then she bounded onto the bed and tried to wedge herself between our pillows to get warm (and get all our bedding wet). I pulled her out, placed a blanket over our pillows and wrapped her up, nestled between the pillows where she slept for an hour.
She’s now almost dry and has been brushed extensively by me, which she also seems to like. She’s two shades less dirt colored and seven times as fluffy. She also smells great. And she’s happy.
The Big Boy Update: My son seems to be recovered from whatever it was that caused him to throw up on Thursday night. We tried a medication today for ADHD but we don’t think it’s going to work as it may have made him more hyper and more prone to being angry and sad. Tomorrow we’re going to try again with a different dosage. I need to write the whole thing up at some point and I will when we know more.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter made me some notes today. She’s good at folding a piece of paper into a “secret message” format, sealing it with a single piece of tape. She writes a little message (which is hard to read because she can’t see what she’s writing) and then folds it up and puts your name on the front. I told her I’d make her a message back. She asked me if I could do it in braille for her, which was rather poignant because she can’t see anything at all. I brought her a black t-shirt home from Cancun with solid, bright letters in yellow, orange and green on it and she couldn’t see even that the shirt was black.
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